Since the eighteenth century philosophers have been divided between two
positions on the relationship between animal and human societies-one that
sees the animal and human worlds as essentially identical, and one that
accentuates the disparity between them. Both outlooks actually form part
of the same movement, which goes back to the very origins of philosophy:
the perception of an opposition between the material and the mental. This
perception has been cast in many ideological molds over the centuries,
and the opposition of nature to culture, of the zoological to the sociological,
has reemerged again and again from the earliest metaphysical thinking down
to contemporary sociology. If we study the view of the animal world held
by Australian aborigines or Eastern Siberians, we find that fundamentally
there is no essential difference between animal and human, that both have
received the same intellectual gifts, and that their reactions, as reflected
in myths over the ages, admit of parity and of a possible continuity of
relations between them. The same view is apparent in the traditional European
fairy tale, where animals speak and behave like humans.
The attitude recurs today in literary form, whether it be traditional tales,
the stories of Kipling, or the adventures of Mickey Mouse. The fact that
this type of writing is regarded as "children's literature" in
no way diminishes its significance. Between this attitude and that of the
nineteenth-century naturalist confronted with the social life of ants,
the difference is minimal. Anthropocentrism is at work in the search for
the "language" of ants no less than in the many fairy tales in
which a bear marries a human girl. And perhaps it is at work again in the
efforts made to establish a radical separation between animal and human
by opposing instinct to intelligence.
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In mythological thought animal and human partake of the same essence, but
their paths diverge at a certain point. The bear or the serpent are males,
the bird maiden is a female, when each has shed its outer skin of bear,
serpent, or wild goose. Dressed in that outer skin, they adopt the species
behavior that goes with it, exactly in the same way as people assume the
behavior of their ethnic group or social class when they assume its clothing.
This attitude, likewise anthropocentric, reveals a perception of the division
of the living world into sociological units with distinct habits, customs,
and external attributes, in contrast with the identity of living beings
in their natural state. This view is so spontaneous and so universal that
it cannot but reflect a real fact, that of the separation between our physical
self and our external social shell. It extends to the animal world something
that is specifically true of us, but it analyzes the essential fact that
we belong to two worlds, the zoological and the sociological. It also brings
out another essential fact, namely that we are humanly significant only
through the behavior peculiar to our group, and if we bear in mind that
in myths animals are identified with actual ethnic groups, it leads on
to the recognition of the determining character of ethnic differences.
In the scientific thought of the past two centuries the same attitudes
are to be seen on two levels in the study of the respective functions of
intelligence and instinct and in the search for the dividing line between
the natural and the cultural. The first is concerned with animal psychology,
the second with ethnology. Our earlier comments on the development of anthropoid
societies by stages in which the link between the zoological and the sociological
has become progressively more tenuous show that the problem can arise simultaneously
at both levels, or rather that there is a possible third level that comes
very close to our empirical picture of preliteral societies. Within the
context of this third track, the problem of grouping would dominate the
question of what is animal and what is human. Society of both animals and
humans would be seen as maintained within a body of "traditions"
whose basis is neither instinctive nor intellectual but, to varying degrees,
zoological and sociological at one and the same time. To an outside observer
the only thing that a society of ants and a human society have in common
is the existence of traditions which ensure from one generation to the
next the transmission of action sequences required for the social group's
survival and development. We may argue over what is like and unlike in
the two groups, but each survives thanks to the exercise of a real memory
in which behaviors are stored. In animals this memory-peculiar to every
species-is based on a highly complex instinctual apparatus, whereas in
anthropoids the memory of each ethnic group rests on the no less complex
apparatus of language.
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To oppose instinct to language rather than to intelligence is legitimate
only if there is true correspondence between the two terms so opposed,
and that correspondence is what we shall try to demonstrate in this chapter.
If it is true to say that the species is the characteristic form of animal
grouping and the ethnic group of human grouping, then a particular form
of memory must correspond to each body of traditions
Countless studies have been devoted to the apparently insoluble problem
of intelligence and instinct The debate, dominated by anthropocentric ideas
until the early twentieth century, seems to have lost much of its vigor
in the past generation Neither instinct nor intelligence can be regarded
as causes: They are effects. instinct does not explain instinctive behavior;
rather, philosophically speaking, it characterizes the accomplishment of
certain complex processes of different origin. In the case of an individual,
instinct may be said to be located at the intersection of the means specific
to that individual and the external causes for deploying those means in
action sequences. The external causes may be provided by education as well
as by stimulation
The distinction between instinct and intelligence is of practical interest
only at the extremes of the scale-in insects as well as in humans-and even
there its real value is difficult to measure. The action programs of the
lower vertebrates are closely conditioned by their internal environment
and by external stimuli The active behavior of an amoeba or an annelid
can be reduced to short sequences triggered or prolonged by causes unrelated
to what might be termed "automatic intelligence" as opposed to
"intelligence based on reflection" Therefore it is not possible
to trace the supposed transformation of instinct into intelligence by starting
at the bottom end of creation and proceeding to the higher animals. The
only fact that emerges from experimental study of animal behavior is the
plasticity of an individual animal's behavior in relation to its specific
means. This must be interpreted as a liberation not from instinct, but
from the fixed sequences established at the confluence of the individual's
internal biological environment and the exterior. The question is thus
one of nervous apparatus rather than of the existence of a property peculiar
to the animal condition. More precisely, the nervous system is not an instinct-producing
machine but one that responds to internal and external demands by designing
programs.
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Today the concept of instinct appears too vague. We have become aware of
the complexity of hereditary behavior patterns. But the existence of species-related
memory14 is difficult to challenge. It may manifest itself in action sequences
resulting from the individual's gradual conditioning by external influences,
to which it responds in the only ways for which it is hereditarily designed.
The fact remains, however, that as one generation succeeds another the
same sequences-or very similar ones-are reproduced from individual to individual.
Instinct expressed as species-related memory is a reality only inasmuch
as the resulting action sequences are constant in nature. Hence what is
at issue is not the contrast between instinct and intelligence but only
the opposition of two modes of programming, one of which- the insect mode-involves
a maximum of genetic predetermination and the other- the human mode-apparently
none at all. In fact the distinction is reflected in brain mechanisms which
differ very widely between insects and humans, and the problem is less
a matter of philosophy than of neurophysiology.
All living organisms can be divided into three groups in terms of instinct
and intelligence. The first is that of the lower invertebrates with their
very rudimentary brain system in which the programs take the form of short,
stereotyped sequences of very simple actions reflecting the state of the
balance between the organism and its environment. The memory of animals
such as the earthworm, the slug, or the limpet can readily be compared
to that of an electronic machine in the sense that (1) the animal is born
with a determined range of needs and means of satisfying them, (2) its
action sequences represent a struggle for balance between organic impulses
and the external environment in a cycle where the action series is determined
by physiological or external causes, and (3) the memory is incorporated
in programs that determine the animal's conditioning. Nervous systems of
this simple type have already been artificially reproduced, and the electronic
apparatus employed in rocket control is already more complex than the brain
of the lower molluscs or of annelids.
The second group is a good deal more problematic. It is represented by
the bee or the ant, insects whose behavior appears to imply the presence
of highly complex genetically recorded programs that go into operation
at once and with disconcerting development in both the larva and the imago.
The execution of these programs is today known to be less perfect than
earlier authors had thought, but it would still be difficult to regard
them simply as the interplay of external and internal environments causing
the formation of a conditioned memory. In seeking to explain the insect's
choice of plants or prey for its nourishment, its building practices, or
its
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activities pertaining to social cohesion, we are obliged to adopt the concept
of a nervous apparatus with highly determined responses to visual, olfactory,
and tactile impressions. Such hereditary determination implies the existence
of a potential memory whose operations appear preconceived because only
a minimal choice of possible responses is available. We can, however, imagine
an artificial apparatus that might select impressions created by light
or by chemicals-or else by vibrations- and channel them into complex action
sequences. We could even envisage a system that would allow a certain indeterminacy,
a possible choice between impressions perceived as being equivalent. If
every internal chemical state produced a specific reaction to impressions
received from the outside, the economy of such a control mechanism would
be very close to an insect's.
The third group would include vertebrates. Here the behavior of the lower
invertebrates is reproduced in that the operating memory is largely conditioned
by mechanical determinism, physiological impulses, and the demands of the
external environment. Again, although ever less strongly as each branching
achieves a higher degree of cerebral development, conditioning is connected
with the existence of potential memory or, in other words, of automatic,
"instinctual" behavior, which is the result of a genetic selection
of possible responses. The vertebrate behaves as if following a preestablished
program, an "instinct" whose consequences we may sometimes think
absurd because it cannot adapt to situations not stored in the collective
memory, whereas in fact it is producing a series of linked responses within
the limits of its organic possibilities. Almost the entire behavior of
the lower vertebrates (fish and reptiles) is of the first two types; we
can imagine an electronic device that would, like the lizard, respond to
phototropic or thermotropic stimuli, become more active with rising temperature,
pursue any moving prey of swallowable size, reject any prey whose consistency
or taste was recorded as being dangerous, and exhibit colored panels when
visually or olfactorily excited. It should be added that actions performed
for the first time by a process of trial and error would be recorded as
programs in a series of memories whose interplay might subsequently trigger
complex operating sequences, going so far as to cause a reversal of behavior
during the performance of a sequence. What is conceivable in fish and reptiles
is also, and to a much more complex degree, conceivable in birds, which
demonstrate in profuse detail that the most elaborate part of automatic
behavior is connected with reproductive activity. This is a general fact
to which I shall revert in the chapter on "symbols of society"
in connection with the relationship between aesthetics and the maintenance
of group cohesion. In our present context we need only
224
note that the elaborateness of automatic behavior varies considerably between,
on the one hand, actions performed for individual survival and, on the
other hand, those taken to ensure the survival of the species.
The behavior of the lower vertebrates may form part of the memory of higher
vertebrates and may indeed constitute its main bulk. But as we rise higher
in the series we obsene a ne v element that suggests that the two earlier
pictures may not be altogether complete. The characteristic feature of
the individual behavior of mammals, at least so far as survival behavior
is concerned, is the possibility of choice between aaion sequences, of
checking the adequacy of each potential response to a given situation-a
margin of control that varies from one species to another but is already
very considerable in carnivores and primates. If we pursued the analogy
with electronic devices, we should have to add to the apparatus for triggering
responses and memorieS another mechanism capable of comparing and of orienting
the device toward a particular response. Within the sweep of evolution,
nervous systems in fact appear to have progressed in two opposite directions,
some (those of insects and birds) toward behavior channeled more and more
narrowly by the nervous apparatus and others (those of mammals and humans)
toward a prodigious enrichment of the nerve pathways by connective elements
capable of establishing connections between new situations and already
experienced ones. The individual's memory, formed in the earliest period
of life, then takes precedence over the species memory, which is merely
the result of the hereditary arrangement of the nervous system.
One of the basic characteristics of humanity is the possession of a brain
capable of making comparisons. Regulatory controls of elementary behavior
are still present, however, in the lower stages of the human nervous system,
and especially in the sympathetic system: The organism is subject to the
same laws of balance between the external and the internal environment
as that of the simplest invertebrates. The middle level, "instinct,"
is also present inasmuch as our operating behavior is molded by the genetic
framework. Since sight and hearing are our predominant sense, our actions
are genetically different from those of an animal whose chief references
might be those of smell and touch. If instinct resides in the accomplishment
of actions the implements for which are genetically conditioned, then a
good deal of our activity is instinctual. In the short lineages that form
within our constantly changing mass of humanity, genetically acquired intellectual
or physical "gifts" represent the equivalent of the "instinctual"
capital of animal lineages. The parallelism between
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the innate aptitudes of human individuals and those of animal species helps
us to understand the nature of instinctual behavior. In neither case are
we dealing with mysterious programs transmitted by atavism and developing
automatically under favorable circumstances, but rather with hereditary
neurovegetative mechanisms that permit the constitution of a memory recorded
in action sequences. Among a thousand individuals given a musical education,
only one may be genetically conditioned to become a great performer of
whom it could be said that he or she played "by instinct"; but
among a thousand musically gifted individuals only one perhaps will receive
a musical education-the others will never have a chance to form their memory
for musical execution, and the connection between their genetic aptitudes
and the demands of the external environment will never be established.
Vocational guidance in modern societies is only the empirical search for
the genetic aptitudes that exist in humans as they do throughout the animal
world.
Human operating behavior therefore draws upon a very extensive instinctual
fund composed both of mechanisms for the regulation of deep organic impulses
common to all individuals and of mechanisms capable of recording operating
programs whose details may vary from one individual to another. This margin
of individual variation, which is considerably wider than in even the most
developed mammals, is an essential trait of human society. The "thinker,"
the inventor, the virtuoso, perform a crucial role in the dialogue between
the physical entity and the collective organism that is society. We must
realize that the presence of individual genius may be genetically normal
in the human species and that progress is less a matter of personal genius
than of a favorable collective environment.
That these facts are to some extent recognized is illustrated by the relative
positions of spirituality and materialism in the ideologies of recent societies.
In the great religions, and especially in Christianity, individual genetic
aptitudes cannot cross the threshold of eternity, and hierarchy in those
religions rests upon foundations that have nothing to do with such gifts.
The saint is not necessarily a thinker nor an inventor or a virtuoso, but
rather one who breaks out of the operating cycle and goes beyond and outside
it. All great metaphysical philosophies are based upon this break which
reflects our liberation from the genetic link and at the same time from
the social one (at a different level, this reflects the homology of the
species with the ethnic group). Materialist ideology-present not only in
Marxist societies but, in pragmatic form, in all human societies-tends,
on the contrary, to accentuate social efficiency. It emphasizes the importance
of the genetic link by making a hero of the "gifted" individual.
In capitalist societies the choice is made within the framework of a hierarchy
divided into social classes, whereas Marxist societies tend to make use
226
of genetic possibilities through the institution of "heroes of labor"
and the cult of personality, a linear hierarchy founded upon the efficacy
of individuals.
The human problem cannot, however, be understood with the help of instinctual
factors alone. The all-too-often forgotten share of the zoological in human
behavior must certainly be taken into account, but if we failed to integrate
the mind in the general biological process we should be dealing with the
infrastructure alone. In chapter 3 we saw the results of destroying the
motor areas of the cerebral cortex change in a most revealing manner from
the dog to the monkey and from the monkey to human. In the dog ablation
of the motor cortex brings about an inability to remember operating sequences
acquired by learning; in the monkey the zones of association bordering
on the main motor area must also be eliminated, and in the human only the
destruction of a very large area indeed will produce the same result. Earlier
these facts provided us with the means of tracing the main stages of development
toward reflective motor function. In our present context they indicate
to some extent the degree of freeing of the human brain. The increasinglywide
aureole that surrounds the centers of voluntary motor function corresponds
to intelligence in the strict sense, that is, both to the capacity to store
large numbers of operating sequences in the memory and to the capacity
to choose between sequences. Between the most highly developed monkey and
the human being, the difference in terms of freedom of choice is qualitative.
True, the most intelligent anthropoid ape can never compare between more
than a limited number of programs and its comparisons must rely on a considerably
smaller neuronic apparatus than the human's, but the difference is essentially
a matter of quality because reflexion is closely connected with language.
In our most common operations, language does not seem to intervene at all.
We perform many actions in a twilight state of consciousness not basically
different from that in which animals perform theirs. But as soon as the
operating sequence is governed by choice it requires the intervention of
a lucid consciousness closely connected with language. Freedom of behavior
is attainable only at the level of symbols, not of actions, and symbolic
representation of actions is indissociable from comparison between actions.
From the lower animals to the higher mammals, the reladve shares of conditioning
acquired genetically and by learning are gradually reversed until a choice
between simple operations becomes possible. But operating behavior remains
completely rooted in lived experience, for projection can only take place
once operations have been freed from their materiality and transformed
into sequences of symbols. If we want to compare animal instinct with human
intelligence, we must depart from the traditional meaning of each of those
terms: We
227
must view instinct as a set of phenomena so complex that the word no longer
has a precise meaning, and intelligence as the ability to project symbolic
sequences. This is tantamount to regarding language as the instrument of
liberation from lived experience. In a parallel manner the hand-tool could
be seen as the instrument of liberation from the genetic constraints by
which an animal's organic implements are tied to the zoological species.
At the level of language therefore, as at that of the implement, human
intelligence observes the relationships we have already described.
Human technical behavior, with its consequences for the headlong development
of the instrumental apparatus of society, needs to be considered at three
levels: species-related, socioethnic, and individual. At the species-related
level, human technical intelligence is connected with the degree of development
of the nervous system and the genetic programing of individual aptitudes;
certain proportions aside, nothing distinguishes it fundamentally from
the behavior of animals, especially as regards its obedience to the extremely
slow rate of species development in general. At the socioethnic level,
human intelligence behaves in a wholly particular and unique manner in
that, transcending both individual and species-related limits, it creates
a collective organism with astonishingly rapid evolutive properties. For
the individual the degree of socioethnic constraint is as imperative as
the zoological constraint that causes one to be born Homo Sapiens, but
the terms of the former are different from those of the latter to the extent
that, under certain conditions, they admit of the possibility of a certain
degree of individual liberation.
At the individual level the human species is equally unique because, having
received from the human cerebral apparatus the ability to compare between
situations translated into symbols, the individual is capable of freeing
him or herself symbolically from both genetic and socioethnic bonds. This
enfranchisement forms the basis for the two complementary situations between
which human reality is lived: one in which comparison between different
operating sequences leads to material mastery over the organic world, and
one in which enfranchisement from the organic world takes place through
the creation of the intuitive situations in which human spirituality consists.
In primates hereditary operating behavior is increasingly influenced by
an individually constituted memory; in humans the problem of operational
memory is dominated by that of language. Although the role of genetic conditioning
and con-
228
ditioning through individual experience remains considerable, it is completely
overlaid by education, through which human individuals receive the whole
of their operating behavior. Individually construned memory and the recording
of personal behavior programs are entirely channeled through knowledge,
whose preservation and transmission in all ethnic communities is ensured
by language. This creates a genuine paradox: The individual's possibilities
for comparison and liberation rest upon a potential memory whose entire
contents belong to society. In insects memory is vested in society only
to the extent that the latter represents the survival of a certain genetic
combination in which the individual's possibilities of comparison are practically
nil. But the human is both a zoological individual and the creator of social
memory, a fact that may shed light upon the manner in which species-related
and ethnic factors affect human behavior and that uniquely human two-way
traffic between the innovative individual and the social community that
makes for progress.
The most important consequences of the transfer of ethnic memory outside
the zoological species are the individual's freedom to transcend the established
ethnic framework and the ability of ethnic memory itself to progress. When
we compare human societies with insect ones, we sometimes forget that in
the latter genetically recorded behavior is dominant and imperative: Each
individual must possess the entire capital of collective knowledge, and
the society can evolve only at the rate of the paleontological drift. No
really well-founded term of comparison between the two kinds of societies
is conceivable because humans are free to create their own situations,
even if these are only symbolic. Rapid and continuous evolution could apparently
be achieved only by breaking the link between species and memory, an exclusively
human soludon. That being so, human sociedes can never become imprisoned
in behavior comparable to that of insects. Their way and ours have been
completely divergent all along. Paleontologists have often pointed out
that our specialization consists in preserving the very general nature
of our apUtudes. This applies far beyond the purely physical context. It
is true that we run less quickly than the horse, cannot digest cellulose
like the cow, climb less well than the squirrel, that our whole osteomuscular
mechanism is superspecialized only in remaining capable of doing all of
those things, but the most important fact is that the human brain has evolved
in such a way that it remains capable of ~inking everything-and that it
is virtually empty at birth.
Individuals at birth are faced with a body of tradidons that belong to
their ethnic group; a dialogue takes place, from childhood, between the
individual and the social organism. Tradidon is as biologically indispensable
to the human species as
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genetic conditioning is to insect sociedes: Ethnic survival relies on routine,
the dialogue taking place produces a balance between rouhne and progress,
routine symbolizing the capital required for the group's survival and progress
the input of individual innovations toward a better survival.
The peculiar character of social memory emerges at another level as well.
The creation of the first art)ficial tool by the first anthropoid put technics
outside the scope of zoological realities and outside the multimillennial
course of evolution, and at the same time made the social memory capable
of adding to itself at a rapid rate. We have seen in earlier chapters that
cerebral evoludon before Homo sapiens remained incomplete and that technical
evolution seemed to follow the very slow development of what humans still
lacked in order to acquire an adequate apparatus for making comparisons.
We have also seen that from the moment of the disappearance of the prefrontal
ridge, a characteristically human evolution led to the birth of a technical
world that drew upon resources outside the confines of genetic evolution.
From the emergence of Homo sapiens, the constitudon of an apparatus of
social memory dominates all problems of human evolution; in chapter 9 we
shall see by what means, up to and including the creation of an artificial
brain, sociedes have attempted to record and preserve their uncontrollably
growing capital of knowledge.
Once again, the dichotomy between the material and the moral becomes apparent.
The theme of "man outstripped by his techniques" emphasizes the
disparity between the evoludon of technology and that of society's moral
apparatus: In the course of thousands of years, we have acquired the technical
means that have helped us to achieve an individually balanced mastery over
the material environment, yet at the same time we continue in a disordered
manner to employ a major part of those means in satisfying our predatory
tendencies which hark back to times when humans were fighting the rhinoceros.
This apparent inability to constitute a "lived" moral behavior
on the level of our technical behavior has nothing abnormal or particularly
distressing about it. It has, we hope, been demonstrated clearly enough
that human evolution did not begin with the brain but with the feet, and
that higher human qualites were able to emerge only in so far as the basis
for their emergence had been constituted much earlier. For thousands of
years individuals have had access to concepts of moral equilibrium quite
as advanced as those achieved in technology. Societes have enshrined these
concepts in their great moral and religious laws, but the genetic behavior
of the mass of individuals who constitute society has not been freed from
its fundamental constraints, which remain essendally pred-
230
atory. Must we then conclude that tens of thousands of years must pass
before a human brain more developed than that of Homo sapiens puts into
effect the contents of moral memory? That is far from obvious; on the contrary,
we believe that progress in this field, although strongly hampered by our
incomplete liberation from biological constraints, nevertheless benefits
from the means offered by technology for the collective arousal of our
consciousness. The means of channeling and orienting our species-determined
aggressivity may come from a clear perception of biological laws. Its total
disappearance would probably mean the end of the human species, but conscious
control of the link between thought and our physiological apparatus offers
an optimist/c prospect of the future.
The forming of operational sequences raises, at its various stages, the
problem of the relationship between the individual and society. Progress
is achieved through the cumulative effects of innovations, yet group survival
is condidoned by the recording of a collective capital presented to individuals
in tradidonal life-sustaining programs. Operational sequences are formed
as a result of interaction between experience, which conditions the individual
by a process of trial and error identical to that of animals, and education
in which language occupies a variable, though always decisive, place. We
have seen earlier that human operation al behavior comprises three stages.
The first takes place at a deep level and is an automatic form of behavior
directly connected with our biological nature. This stage provides the
basis upon which education eventually imprints the data of tradition. Physical
attitudes, eating habits, and sexual behavior rest upon this genetic base,
their modalities being strongly marked by ethnic nuances. The second stage
is that of mechanical behavior and includes operation al sequences acquired
through experience and education, recorded in both gestural behavior and
language but taking place in a state of dimmed consciousness which, however,
does not amount to automatism because any accidental interruption of the
sequence will set off a process of comparison involving language symbols.
This process leads on to the third stage, that of lucid behavior, in which
language plays a preponderant role, either by helping to repair an accidental
interruption of the sequence or by creating a new one.
These three stages succeed one another at each level of human behavior
in varying proportions and in direct relationship with the survival of
the social mechanism.
231
Like any attempt to divide a continuum, the division of operational behavior
into these three stages is arbitrary, but it coincides with the psychologists'
categories of the unconscious, the subconscious, and the conscious, which
in turn correspond to three levels of operation of the human neuropsychological
apparatus. This distinction is certainly more important than one that might
be drawn between insdoct and intelligence in that it separates strictly
insdnctual, genetically channeled acdons from sequences in which language
and consciousness do not intervene in an ordered manner and do not express
themselves through symbols. Psychological terms could no doubt be applied
to technical operations, but they carry all kinds of implications that
itwould be best to avoid in the present context. In speaking of operational
sequences, we therefore propose to use the terms "automatic,"
"mechanical," and "lucid" or "fully conscious."
Ethnology ignores automatic praaices because it is more interested in what
makes cultures different from one another than in what all humans have
physiologically in common. Racial anthropology attaches some importance
to identifying differences in the physical functioning of different races,
and has even attempted to establish something like a racial psychology.
But practically nothing is known about what is genetically significant;
most of the differences observed belong to the cultural superstructure.
Literature on the subject of "wolf children," strongly tinged
as it is with legend, yields hardly any scientific information as to what
a human being living exclusively off the genetic fund might be like. Although
the role of our anatomical and physiological heritage is undoubtedly decisive,
we must finally conclude that spontaneous behavior in the human species
is overlaid by behavior acquired through the social community. Within the
perspective adopted in this book, however, we must not fail to attach due
importance to spontaneous behavior. The problem will be taken up again
later in the context of gesture and of aesthetic categories.
Although data on the automatic aspeas of operation al behavior are scarce,
praaices whose roots are to be found in colleaive life offer opportunitiesof
observing the influences exercised reciprocally by the individual and the
environment. Every aaion performed by an individual forms part of his or
her operational behavior, but it does so in different forms and with different
degrees of intensity depending on whether the practice is elementary and
recurrent on a daily basis, occasional or exceptional. The programs involved
presuppose different levels of intelleaual aaivity and different relationships
between the individual and society. Elementary pracdces are the individual's
vital programs. They include all those daily actions that affect
232
one's survival as an element of society: bodily constitution, dietary and
hygienic habits, actions performed in the exercise of one's profession,
actions involved in one's association with family and friends, and so forth.
These programs, drawn from an unchanging fund, are organized in sequences
of stereotyped gestures whose repetition ensures the individual's normal
balance within the social environment and his or her own psychological
comfort within the group. Elementary operational sequences are acquired
early in life through training by imitation, experience by trial and error,
and verbal communication. The individual's integration in society depends
upon the smooth performance of these operation al sequences in normal life.
Most of the sequences we perform between waking and going to bed require
only slight conscious intervention; they take place, not in a state of
automatism where consciousness would be nil, but in a psychological twilight
from which the individual is aroused only by some unforeseen occurrence.
In the gestures we perform when washing and dressing or eating our meals
or writing , the return to full consciousness is exceptional but it is
decisive, and that is why I prefer to speak of "mechanical operational
sequences" rather than of automatic, unconscious, or instinctive ones.
Mechanical operational sequences form the basis of individual behavior;
they are our essential element of survival. Under the condidons of human
life they take the place of "instina" because they imply a high
level of potential cerebral aaivity or "cerebral availability."
Operational behavior requiring constant full consciousness is anually unimaginable,
just as is completely condidoned operation al behavior in which full consciousness
can be dispensed with altogether-the former because every gesture, including
the least significant, would have to be reinvented, the latter because
it would presuppose a completely preconditioned, and therefore inhuman,
brain. The human brain is so designed that it can reserve a part of its
availability by creating elementary programs that guarantee freedom of
behavior under exceptional circumstances. These elementary pranices, whose
sequences begin at birth, place the strongest ethnic imprint upon the individual.
The gestures, attitudes, and ways of behaving in humdrum day-to-day situations
form that part of our link with the original social group from which we
never free ourselves even when transplanted into a different class or ethnic
environment.
Today's polidcal readjustments and the general process of "planetarization
" currently taking place are causing serious problems in this respea.
For the individual, the divers)fication of ethnic groups and the emergence
of operational praadces common to fairly large social units are a matter
of psychological balance. In our particular zoological group the ethnic
unit replaces the species: human individuals dif
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fer ethnically as animals do in terms of their species. At the level of
elementary practices, this specificity is perceived only by contrast: Certain
gestures that I perform are felt to be peculiar to my group only by contrast
with those of strangers. Ethnic practices are thus a source of differentiation,
though, by the same token, also of comfort and intimacy among members of
the same group, and they make individuals isolated in a strange environment
feel even more uprooted. Completely interchangeable individuals would no
doubt benefit society, in its role of consumer of individuals in the name
of social progress, but to what extent would society still encompass members
if they ceased to be ethnically diverse? Whatever the answer to that quesdon
may be (we shall revert to it later), mechanical operation al sequences
form the fund of individual behavior common to members of the same ethnic
group. They are performed at a deep level of colleaive memory and involve
language only to a limited extent. Not until a very advanced stage of organization
of colleaive consciousness do we find the social or professional gesture
written down in books on edquette, "how-to" books, or textbooks
on ethnography. The transmission of elementary sequences is essentially
conneaed with the organization of social cells of limited size and, in
particular, of families or groups of children or adolescents. Games involving
imitation of adults play an important role in this process.
Thus active individuals orient the major part of their andvides with the
help of programs established in the course of their ethnic group's development
and recorded in their motor memory by education. They perform these anion
sequences or "chains" in a state in which full consciousness
intervenes in order, as it were, to adjust the links of the chain. To put
it more precisely, lucidity follows a sinusoidal curve whose troughs are
mechanical series and peaks represent adjustments of those series to the
operation's specific circumstances. This is already a characteristic of
the intelligence of higher mammals. In us it is so intense as to be one
of the decisive charaaeristics of human behavior. Conscious intervention,
conneaed as it is with the ability to compare, not only orients the operational
process but also enables us to cope with accidental situations-that is,
to rectify the operational process by adjusting the appropriate links of
the chain. The possibility of reaifying, of making improvements both in
the field of social relatdons and in that of technology, is the invention
facor: It reasserts the role of the human individual as inventor in the
general course of progress. The charaaeristic capacity of human societies
to accumulate and preserve technical innovations is connected with the
collective memory. Our role is to organize our operational sequences consciously
toward the creation of new processes.
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Periodically Recurring or Exceptional Operational Sequences
In the case of operations that go beyond mechanical sequences-seasonally
recurring agricultural activities, giving a feast, building a house, group
fishing or hunting-the collective memory is organized differently. The
role of the mechanism that records the operational series in the collective
memory varies in importance depending on the length of the interval at
which the operation is performed. In each case language intervenes as the
medium for the actions to be performed. All societies without writing possess
a range of means of preservation in the form of proverbs, precepts, or
recipes, often stored in the memory of only a few individuals. Periodic
operations, especially long-term ones, require more than mechanical storage
and represent one of the traits that most radically distinguish human society
from the rest of the zoological world. In animal societies there are operations
that occur seasonally or only once in the lives of individuals, triggered
by the succession of seasons or by physiological maturing. The animal will'
then perform new sequences within the channel of its genetic preconditioning,
or it will pick up the thread of operations already experienced under identical
conditions. Much of the human attitude toward periodic operations is also
connected with the seasonal cycle and with physiological maturing: The
same collective operation is lived differently depending on the individual's
age and experience, but the process is traditional rather than genetic
and is maintained in a set of verbal formulations that forms part of the
ethnic capital.
Human operational behavior, although apparently forming a single whole,
thus involves several highly complex processes. It is of course closely
connected with social life, but it cannot be circumscribed either by crudely
contrasting human intelligence with the bee's instinct or by concluding
that because both insects and human beings live in society, their societies
are essentially the same.
The human in fact is both closer to the animal world than the traditional
dichotomy between instinct and intelligence would have us think and much
further from it than might be inferred from the striking similarities between
the social structures of all animals with an organized collective life.
We seem to have lost nothing of what may have been our remote kinship with
the trilobite or the earthworm. Every element of psychological organization
that the vertebrate needs for its vital balance we need too. But all these
elements are the steering wheel that steers our vegetative activity behind
what is particular and peculiar to ourselves alone: our symbolizing faculty,
or to put it more generally, that property of the human brain that consists
in
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maintaining a distance between lived experience and the organism that serves
as its medium. The problem of the dialogue between the individual and society,
which has come up in connection with the question of intelligence and instinct
and which will come up again and again in the rest of this book, is nothing
other than this capacity human beings have of distancing themselves from
their environment, both external and internal. This detachment, which expresses
itself in the separation between tool and hand and between word and object,
is also reflected in the distance society creates between itself and the
zoological group. The whole of our evolution has been oriented toward placing
outside ourselves what in the rest of the animal world is achieved inside
by species adaptation. The most striking material fact is certainly the
"freeing" of tools, but the fundamental fact is really the freeing
of the word and our unique ability to transfer our memory to a social organism
outside ourselves.
This twofold distancing-of tools and of the memory-will form the subject
of the next chapters.